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2026.10.05 | TB | Software | Mainframe Data Integrity Software: Precisely

原标题：North American Mainframe & Data Integrity Software Space & Precisely Software – Former Senior Executive, Global Channel Management at Precisely Software Inc

#software

Third Bridge · 2026-10-05

Client-led • 21 Sep 2026

Companies: PBI US, SAP DE, IBM US

Expert Former Senior Executive, Global Channel Management at Precisely Software Inc

Agenda

Questions

00:00:55] We looked at Precisely and other companies in the mainframe software space, such as Rocket Software, BMC, and Ensono, which is more on the services side. I understand the mainframe software space to a certain degree and the story around what happened over the last 10 years and what's happening more recently, as fewer and fewer remaining non-mainframe users are left on the mainframe. Everyone who's left on it is staying, from our understanding. What we're seeing in all the other software service providers, how IBM is doing, all of that combined is how we're forming it. Thinking about Precisely, how much of their business is in that super sticky, probably you'll never get a new customer again. Still, you can theoretically push a lot of price, and a lot of these players have been pushing a lot of price over the years. How much of Precisely's business is in that bucket? How much is other random stuff that they seem to have acquired over time?

Expert [00:06:09]: Their other products are still extremely sticky, but nothing is, to your point, is as sticky as mainframe. Once you're on mainframe, no one starts at the mainframe these days, but if you're on a mainframe, you typically don't get off the mainframe. There's one million and one reasons why that is. Once you're on mainframe, you're not going to be able to easily get off, and therefore, you will just continue to pay maintenance fees on the software you're running to keep it running. Think of it as a tax. I pay Precisely every year for my data capture software and that tax ensures that somebody is always available if there is a problem and make sure that it keeps running. Mainframes are bedrock infrastructure. People pay the price for them to keep them running and they pay the price to continue running the software to do what they're doing. There's lots of things that can be done on top of it, especially with CDC, change data capture. We had partners that were excited about doing things that would take data in real time from the mainframe to be able to do real-time fraud detection and that sort of thing. That was partners taking, if you will, and these specialities are the exception, not the rule of partners. Really building out interesting functionality that the customers were prepared to pay for.

00:08:27] You mentioned data capture. I saw a number of things they highlighted in their marketing and investor materials. What are the products they provide at a high level on the mainframe side and beyond that?

Expert [00:08:54]: That's the problem. I think there's something like 30 or 40 different products. Specific to the mainframe, you get change data capture. You've also got products like Ironstream for security. You went from security for the mainframe and change data capture, CDC, they could take data from other places, which is why they pulled things like Automate would pull data from SAP, took in and out of SAP, data quality products to actually do dedupe, cleanup, and addressing, the stuff that they bought from Pitney Bowes.

They had what they call Locate or Geo Addressing, you'll also sometimes hear called Spatial Analysis. The idea was and what some customers did do is, I'll give you a real-world example. Your credit card gets swiped buying a bus ticket. Okay. That sounds normal. If you've got the right geolocation and data in real time from the mainframe, it suddenly realises, well, X bought a bus ticket just now. He bought the bus ticket in Colombia. 15 minutes before that, he bought a Starbucks in Texas. One of those things can't be right, and then they can very quickly put a stop to it. That's fraud detection in real time. That's a thing that a partner actually built to make it look like it was a data integrity suite.

If that had been put together again, it looked like the data integrity suite, but it had actually been cobbled together by partners to put a nice face on it. What if you're an insurance company, they use mainframes still, obviously, but I want to give you a price on insurance. I need to know if there's a flood risk, if there's a forest fire risk, that sort of thing, that's part of Locate. All of this was meant to be one single platform that the customer would buy the modules that appeal to them or made sense for the business. Some customers were going to buy it all.

Client 1 [00:13:42]: The story was that we can try to create this integrated platform that theoretically adds a bunch of value, even though someone else pieces it together. I guess you can't add value if you're not the one piecing it together.

Expert [00:14:05]: Correct. I always thought of it as they have all the ingredients to make the absolute best cake you have ever eaten in your entire life. They just seem unwilling or unable to put them all in the bowl, mix it together and put it in the oven. They just wouldn't do that.

Client 1 [00:19:58]: Based on the numbers, it doesn't seem like they've been hitting that 5-7%. There is some churn somewhere in the business.

Expert [00:20:09]: Yes. No one has 100% renewal. Nobody does. The closest people that ever had that were VMware and then Broadcom came along to make sure, that's why I'm pushing back on cross-sell and upsell. If the only time your customer hears from you is when it's time to renew, they will eventually find alternatives. No matter what your product is. You could be super, super sticky in mainframe. There are alternatives. They will look for them if the only time they hear from you is on month 35 of the 36-month contract. Compensation drives behaviour. If they were paid on renewals, they'd be a whole lot more interested in renewals. They weren't paid on renewals. Everywhere else that I have ever sold software in the 30 years of Intel and software, the AEs are paid on, they're paid something, not a lot, but they are paid something on renewals. They care, make sure it gets done. They've got a reason to pick up the phone the customer. Tie that to cross-sell and upsell.

If I hear from you more often and you're selling me other things and pulling it all together under an umbrella of this suite, then your churn rate is going to go down because, "Hey, my Precisely rep or Precisely themselves are providing value to me, not only in the main product that I initially bought, but also in these other things that they've understood about my business and therefore, offer these other options." I'm a big believer in the importance of the good doctor vs the nice doctor. I don't want the nice doctor. I want the good doctor and Precisely doesn't have good doctors and in most cases, you're just left in the waiting room until month 35 when somebody shows up and says, "Okay, it's time to renew." You're never going to have 100% renewal rate. You're going to have a much higher renewal rate if you're talking to the customer more often. In those conversations, you're providing value in the form of, hey, this is what my other customers are doing. This is what we're also seeing in the industry where in X industry, where X is whatever industry that customer is in and providing actual value that way, the customers will buy more.

00:25:51] Regarding competition, you mentioned people find someone else to provide the software. Who are the main ones that you think about? I know they do 30 different things, but who are the core ones here?

Expert [00:26:12]: Yes. I think the main ones would be Rocket, you mentioned them on the mainframe side. Think about CDC, IBM and Kyndryl, and I know they're separate, but not separate because the Kyndryl people still think they're IBMers. Additionally, some of their other products, I'm trying to think, there's one million geolocation and spatial competitors.

I'm trying to think who else. I am forgetting something really important. It will come to me in a minute. Competitors are always a challenge. That is not the core challenge at Precisely. Precisely, the products they have that they bought were best-of-breed products. The challenge was they smash them all together. If you smash 10 Corvettes together, a Lamborghini doesn't pop out. You have to be a lot more intentional with what you're doing, and they just were not. Stibo is another competitor on the product data side.

00:29:24] We saw the Informatica platform in one of the random research reports we saw. Are they a competitor on the Salesforce product side?

Expert [00:29:41]: Yes, good point. I think the challenge with Informatica is they don't have a better product, but their ability to get in front of the customer with a better story, with a good doctor story, with a point of view and then to execute that point of view is, again, it comes to culture. Only players, but Informatica shows up to earn the business and Precisely shows up expecting the business, and that's two very different ways of showing up to the customer. I do not think their product is better. I know that it is not, but their reps are better. Windows NT was absolutely not better than Novell, but Microsoft knew how to market and how to put the right people in front of the customer.

00:38:00] Were there any instances where folks who weren't using some Precisely products were switching away from competitors to use Precisely? What were their reasons in any of those cases?

Expert [00:38:22]: I'm sure it happened. I didn't see that. What I did see is when net-new stuff was sold, it was sold to net-new customers, meaning somebody who didn't go from Rocket to Precisely that I ever saw. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but I didn't see it. Where we would see net new is partners like a GoodLabs, They would find net new customers around single projects. So it would be more project-based. Pete or Susie at ABC Widgets wants to figure out where to put the next, let's call it a gas station, then these guys get involved and then sell the appropriate Precisely products.

00:39:50] Thinking about the 60% off the mainframe, you talked about geospatial. As an outsider, that doesn't sound like something that should be particularly sticky in any way. What is the product suite there that makes it sticky?

Expert [00:40:16]: Yes. No, Geospatial is super sticky. If you take geospatial and you layer other data on it like fire, flood, crime, whatever, you can get a really good idea of what your customer looks like if you're an insurance company for sake of argument. What their paying threshold is when it comes to paying more for insurance. Once those insurance folks are used to a particular product, there's no way they're changing without a gun to their head.

It doesn't sound interesting, but there's a ton of data there. Once you've enriched that data, you can really work out from a sales and marketing point of view, depending on what business you're in, where your money should be spent, where you should put a new gas station, a new shop, whether or not I'm going to pay 10% or 20% more for my insurance than I normally would. It's tremendous help. Think about surge pricing. We can charge more for X or Y at this particular time because all these other things are happening. My saying is these are great things, but they are lucrative things.

00:42:21] On the risk assessment side, we heard Verisk is the market leader in helping insurers price risk or figure out claims. There's also CoreLogic and Cotality in that space. Is that adjacent? Are they somewhat competing with those giants?

Expert [00:42:47]: Yes. No, I would say that's more adjacent. The data that Precisely sells is the foundation of that. These guys sell how to use the data, they don't sell the data. There's no reason why they couldn't buy the data. That's another challenge that Precisely had is that there was, pick a competitor, competitor X or don't even call them a competitor yet. Pete or Susie come to get a hold of a Precisely rep maybe before Precisely owned that piece of software and say, "We would like to buy that data." It was specifically around data like fire, crime, flood, school districts, all this kind of stuff. They'd say, "I'd like to buy this data from you, but I want to make it available in a special portal or whatever to my customers. I'm going to mash it up for them." Again, you come back to Precisely is an enterprise software company, but it does not have enterprise class sales reps. If you understand the distinction, it's a little lag.

Client 2 [00:44:49]: With all these different acquisitions, is there a different sales force for each of them? They seem like totally different businesses. Is this run like 10 different businesses under one umbrella, but for all intents and purposes, there is no Precisely?

Expert [00:45:21]: Yes, that's it, exactly. If I work in the Automate business or the IBM Infrastructure business, I work in that. Obviously, I have my own management layer. Equally, I do not get paid on anything that happens in Automate, even if I walk the Automate rep in. I'm not at all incented to think about the company Precisely, the company, the customer or anybody that isn't me.

00:48:25] How are the assets acquired from Pitney Bowes in 2018-19 doing? When I think of Pitney Bowes, I think of a dying mail business. Why is it combined with the mainframe business?

Expert [00:48:50]: Yes. I can answer both of these questions. The Pitney Bowes business continues along because if you think if you're shipping anything and you need a mail address, once you've got that set-up in your system, untangling that is going to be massive heartburn. Are you really going to go to a PostGrid or somebody like that to tear out what you've got and maybe you've been on Pitney Bowes since the beginning of the internet, maybe longer if you go back. They used to sell the machines things. Equally, if you take that data, that data when it's Pitney Bowes data, it just sounds like oh, boring who cares. The vision, which is what I bought into of a one place to go to be able to bring all of your different types of data points together so you can make a much more educated decision on your business based on where something is, how it's impacted by other layers of data.

Pitney Bowes on itself is not interesting. None of these products on their own are particularly interesting. The data integrity suite had it actually shipped, had it actually done what we said it was going to do and still say it does on the website, that was really something. That is incredibly powerful if you're somebody trying to figure out whether it's do something good, do something lucrative, do whatever it is you want to do, it's some pretty powerful stuff.

01:00:24] What are your final thoughts on things we haven't covered that are important for us to know or look into as we dig deeper here?

Expert [01:00:39]: Yes. The only other thing I would say is, again, they have all the right raw materials. They just don't seem to want to make the changes or even make a side lane to get the product out the door that the customers will be most interested in. I've avoided saying this the whole time, but every time you use AI for something, it gets something wrong. It always gets something wrong. let AI, let Claude do your homework, but check it before you hand it in. All of the data that Precisely is sitting on is accurate. If you could tie, it doesn't matter which AI, I don't care if it's ChatGPT or Claude or whoever, Gemini, If you could tie that to clean, enriched data, you'd get much better answers. Everybody would get much better answers. That is a play that Precisely should have been looking at with agentic AI. They just dropped the ball on that one, too.